Street's Ken owes £600,000

Coronation Street actor Bill Roache is in debt to the tune of more than half a million pounds, it emerged yesterday.

The 69-year-old star, who has played Ken Barlow since the ITV soap began 40 years ago, has been fighting spiralling financial difficulties for a number of years.

But the sheer scale of the amount he owes to creditors stunned his colleagues in the showbusiness industry when details were revealed at a court hearing yesterday.

'We knew Bill had debts but I think it's fair to say few people knew just how big they apparently are,' said one television insider.

The firm representing his various creditors revealed that the actor - whose problems began when he was ordered to pay legal costs against a national newspaper despite winning a libel case - now has debts amounting to approximately £600,000.

At Crewe county court, in Cheshire, an application for Roache - who earns more than £160,000 a year - to pay more to clear the debts was adjourned until next Thursday.

The stress of the occasion was clearly too much for his wife Sara, who attacked a television cameraman as she left the court.

Shouting obscenities, Mrs Roache - who is also her husband's business manager - ran at Carlton Central television's Malcolm Powell as he filmed the couple leaving the court building.

She was then caught on camera trying to hit him on his back and head with a red plastic file.

Whilst her husband looked on, apparently embarrassed, Mrs Roache then lashed out at a freelance reporter.

The whole incident was later relayed on ITV News.

Mr Roache was first declared bankrupt in 1999 with debts of around £300,000.

His difficulties began some eight years earlier when he was forced to pay huge legal costs despite winning a libel claim against The Sun newspaper, which had branded him 'boring', smug and disliked by his colleagues.

He was awarded £50,000 in damages. However, because the figure was exactly the same amount that the paper had earlier offered him in an out- of-court settlement, he subsequently had to meet legal costs of around £120,000.

Further financial catastrophe followed when the actor - the only surviving member of the original Coronation Street cast - then tried to sue his solicitors, Peter Carter-Ruck and Partners, claiming they had failed to fully warn him about the risks of pressing on with the libel case.

After losing this later case, he was then left with yet another huge, but undisclosed, legal bill.

A spokesman for PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accountancy firm acting for Mr Roache's creditors, has applied for an income payment order against the star. But a spokesman for the company last night refused to disclose exactly how much the actor was currently paying to clear the debts.

'Mr Roache owes about £600,000 and he is bankrupt. We have made an application for an income payment order to see whether Mr Roache can make further payments from his income,' he said.

The creditors are understood to include the Inland Revenue.

In addition to the pressures of the ongoing legal process, Mr Roache is also among a group of actors on the popular soap currently fighting a move by Granada television to cut their wages by up to a third.